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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28439 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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The effects of epigenitics, microbiota, and environmental cells are just quite small. The evidence just isn't there. Environmental confounding is very well addressed by existing studies. "lack of an actual genetic explanation" - again, complex traits are extremely polygenic.

Quite frankly given the high level of motivated reasoning I see behind the HBD debate I doubt that the proponents of this theory are more careful than the academics who point at other factors. I would have to see significant actual evidence that they indeed have taken these things into consideration.

There are significant and obvious causal factors, like for instance lead exposure:

Overall, Black children had an adjusted +0.83 µg/dL blood Pb (95% CI 0.65 to 1.00, p < 0.001) and a 2.8 times higher odds of having an EBLL ≥5 µg/dL (95% CI 1.9 to 3.9, p < 0.001). When stratified by risk factor group, Black children had an adjusted 0.73 to 1.41 µg/dL more blood Pb (p < 0.001 respectively) and a 1.8 to 5.6 times higher odds of having an EBLL ≥5 µg/dL (p ≤ 0.05 respectively) for every selected risk factor that was tested. For Black children nationwide, one in four residing in pre-1950 housing and one in six living in poverty presented with an EBLL ≥5 µg/dL. In conclusion, significant nationwide racial disparity in blood Pb outcomes persist for predominantly African-American Black children even after correcting for risk factors and other variables.

See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7084658/

And how exactly do they account for the elements that are not well studied? Like for instance volatile organic compounds in the air and poorer air circulation/higher CO2 levels at home? Being poor puts people closer to environmental contaminants that have large and well-known effects on the overall intelligence of people.

Quite frankly given the high level of motivated reasoning I see behind the HBD debate I doubt that the proponents of this theory are more careful than the academics who point at other factors. I would have to see significant actual evidence that they indeed have taken these things into consideration.

Right, but we're discussing the individual heritability of intelligence here, not the race-level heritability, so this is an area where the scientific consensus disagrees with the comment you linked. See e.g. this review, finding intelligence to be highly heritable through genes. This isn't a HBD guy, this is ". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.[1] He is the author of several books on genetics and psychology." and "Plomin was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to scientific research.[8]". There is a tremendous amount of mainstream literature on the heritability of intelligence, a lot of back and forth between various camps, and the consensus has ended up that there are large genetic components.

Crucially, I stated that environmental confounding was well addressed for the heritability of intelligence among individuals, and that this is the consensus. I am not claiming that the scientific consensus claims environmental confounding has been addressed as an issue for the heritability of intelligence contributing to group differences.

Right, but we're discussing the individual heritability of intelligence here, not the race-level heritability, so this is an area where the scientific consensus disagrees with the comment you linked. See e.g. this review, finding intelligence to be highly heritable through genes. This isn't a HBD guy, this is ". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.[1] He is the author of several books on genetics and psychology." and "Plomin was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to scientific research.[8]". There is a tremendous amount of mainstream literature on the heritability of intelligence, a lot of back and forth between various camps, and the consensus has ended up that there are large genetic components.

I don't doubt that intelligence is heritable; however on a group level there is very little actual diversity within the human population given the fact that our most common ancestor is very recent, and HBD is making claims about the average intelligence of different groups.

The simple way to settle this would be to:

A. Discover the genes responsible for intelligence. B. Genetically test a significant number of various groups to get a baseline rate of their presence. C. Derive the genetic difference in intelligence between groups.

Has anyone actually done this?

  • -10

You keep saying there's very little diversity. What counts as little? What's your scale? What would be enough diversity, and why that threshold?

There's very obviously enough that we can plainly notice it for some traits, and you haven't acknowledged this.

Modern humans are a lot alike--at least at the genetic level--compared with other primates. If you compare any two people from far-flung corners of the globe, their genomes will be much more similar than those of any pair of chimpanzees, gorillas, or other apes from different populations. Now, evolutionary geneticists have shown that our ancestors lost much of their genetic diversity in two dramatic bottlenecks that sharply squeezed down the population of modern humans as they moved out of Africa between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago.

See: https://www.science.org/content/article/how-we-lost-our-diversity

Yes, this is true.

Now, why is it enough to matter? If the problem was that the out-of-Africa bottleneck of ~10000 or whatever it was, was too small, is there some higher number at which it would make sense to talk about variation being relevant?

Being much more similar at a genetic level than average does not mean that they are similar along any particular trait, as has been pointed out to you repeatedly, and there is clearly enough variation that we can see some traits vary.

My point isn't to disagree that humans have lower genetic diversity than chimpanzees or whatever (especially if we are excluding the most genetically diverse groups like the pygmies, sticking to the majority of the world's population), that's just true, and you're right on that. But you keep bringing this up as evidence that genes can't matter, for which it is only very weak evidence, not at all a serious consideration.

But you keep bringing this up as evidence that genes can't matter, for which it is only very weak evidence.

I'm bringing it up because genes do matter, but there simply isn't nearly as much diversity within the human population which means the overall effect of genetics cannot be large on a population level. It tempers the overall impact of any kind of diversity, the fact that we humans are so similar. I simply do not believe that HBD as seemingly commonly held in this forum is nearly strong enough as a concept to use it as a battering ram to dismiss or deflect the mainstream or the left wing's position on this matter.

Once again, how do you explain height differences?

How much difference would you accept as reasonable based on genetics? Clearly, one standard deviation is too much. A half maybe?

You’re right about the overall limits of variance we are going to see among human populations.

However.

In the grand scheme of things, 85, 100, and 115 IQs are not a huge amount of variation for our species anymore than 5’5”, 5’10”, and 6’3” heights are.

At some point we will have exhausted plausible environmental explanations for the achievement gap.

In fact, we already have, as evidenced by arguments serving as excuses that it would take centuries to get past the effects of misfortune (an order of magnitude more than what the Supreme Court thought), and that ever-present “systemic racism” is behind any disparity, with no need to show actual evidence of racism.

The tide of the evidence is being pulled in one direction along multiple fronts, and so people want to pretend we have the same understanding of genetics as 50+ years ago when it was less clear and explicit oppression was far worse and more recent.

To my friends, everything; to my enemies, epistemic humility.

The average height of a Chinese man is 170cm and the average height of a European man is 180cm. The difference between the two is only a little above 5% on average with recent males being 175cm which indicates that much of this disparity is not genetic, but environmental. This represents populations that are separated by the largest continent in the world.

See: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202110/1235772.shtml

How much difference would you accept as reasonable based on genetics? Clearly, one standard deviation is too much. A half maybe?

Honestly, probably less than half a standard deviation but probably not nothing. It's not really that important though, because I believe that there are significant gains that can be had if the environmental influences are taken into consideration and ameliorated.

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